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Dear World, You Are Stupid, Here Is Why	Sep. 8th, 2011 @ 03:12 pm

This was going to be a collection of rants on things which have annoyed me lately, but I still have bronchitis a bit and I was running out of steam after one, so:

1) The Inappropriate Use of YouTube

So, I saw the xkcd comic about something called Cleverbot having a conversation with itself. I was curious, and tried to look up the chatlog - after all, it's two bots talking to each other, so that's totally a text thing, right?

I had trouble finding it, and gave up in not-that-curious soon afterwards. Chas found the link, though -

- and it was to a YouTube video.

A pure text chatlog had been made into a YouTube video and that was the only version that seemed to be findable.

In a similar vein, I recently tried to look up instructions on how to disassemble a PS3. I found a couple of badly-written text descriptions, but they were for a different model, or terrible, or possibly both. What was abundantly available was YouTube videos of the process.

When looking for guidance on how to do something, YouTube videos as the only answers are increasingly common. This is, to me, an infuriatingly bad way of presenting information. Whether by voiceover or subtitle, the information is presented aggravatingly slowly, and for visual reference, one has to fast forward, pause, and rewind constantly, rather than simply glancing at photos or diagrams.

And it's incredibly rare that a video of someone doing something is actually as useful as a detailed explanation of the process, in words, accompanied by helpful, carefully chosen photographs or diagrams, which can be provided with vastly better magnification and resolution.

If I'm looking up a recipe for, say, cake, I don't want to watch a video of someone baking a cake. I want a list of ingredients, and clear instructions for assembling those ingredients into the form of cake. I also want to be able to glance at the instructions while I'm doing it without having to find the point in a video that matches where I'm up to, and I want to be able to see what subsequent steps will be so I'm prepared for them.

If I'm looking up a recipe for a disassembled PlayStation, the same thing applies. And if I'm looking up a piece of text, I want the text, I don't want a person or a computer to read it to me. I learned to read a very long time ago, and I can read to myself much better and faster than anyone can read to me.

2) The fact that anyone is still publishing Orson Scott Card

FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND RIGHT IN THIS WORLD, WHY. Dude wrote one good book. ONE. He is now crapping out rubbish that shits on the very concept of English-language literature, in bad, bad prose less nuanced and eloquent than crap I wrote for assignments in HIGH SCHOOL.

Tags: rants